I know this is a meme, but I do think it’s worth mentioning most D1 popular sports costs like, coach’s salaries, scholarships, facilities, equipment, and travel, aren’t funded through the university.
It’s still a pretty messed up system, don’t get me wrong. Just pointing out the universities aren’t giving scholarships to athletes instead of students… at least not directly.
There’s like three hundred million Americans, and I feel like nowhere near enough of them are passionate about how higher education and unpaid athletes performing for the commercial benefit of rich people should have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
I would be passionate about it if anybody would listen to me decrying how ridiculous the entire shenanigan is. But I have a feeling nobody would ever listen to me.
If Elon musk or Bill Gates or Steve Jobs…sry dead or President Biden or John Cena were passionate about how higher education and unpaid athletes performing for the commercial benefit of rich people should have absolutely nothing to do with each other… then I think people would listen.
"You’re talking about 95 percent of colleges that probably spend somewhere between … $40 million and $5 million on college sports, and they lose money,” Baker said
Which I can’t really understand at all as an Englishman. A lot of universities here do have sports teams but they’re mostly amateur. The only major event really is the Oxford vs Cambridge boat race which does get sponsorship.
Fully anecdotal, but one of my 6th form rugby teammates went to watch a high school american football game, and said they were comparably as good as we were. Only difference is they filled a stadium and we’d get 3 dads on the sideline.
Junior teams for professional clubs do very much pay attention to school leagues and youth club rugby for players to ‘scoop up’.
Seems like a purely cultural difference around going to watch lower level matches to me, rather than the player skill and career trajectory being different.
Yeah I don’t know enough about how the US system works. From the media it seems like every high school has a team that draws a crowd.
My experience in the UK system was that even the same secondary school doesn’t consistently have a team for each sport.
Also in the UK, it seems like we don’t get behind our school teams (even whilst we’re in school with them). They’re just seen as something the sporty kids do. But that’s all purely my experience of our school system. Could be completely different in a different city/county.
It’s the whole setup. The marching band comes in and plays, too. I was in band but I don’t really remember if it was actually every game we came and played too but it was a lot. So they’re like big events. Cheerleaders also, that’s a lot of students with parents who want to see their child perform.
Some sports are profitable. A lot of sports aren’t.
A lot of the sports programs go back to a time when universities acted more like finishing schools for the wealthy and intelligent. It was thought that sports, especially team sports, were a good way to teach the soft skills of being a leader.
That’s the problem. They shouldn’t be worried about profit. The fact that education and health are completely focused on profit in the US really demonstrates how far we’ve gone down a wrong path. (I’m not a talkie or even a leftist for the record, just hate unfettered capitalism)
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